Maybe I’m reaching a little bit too far into the chess piece theories for DA:4, but then again BioWare shouldn’t have put a literal chess game twice into DA:I and named our new protagonist Rook if they didn’t want us reaching, right 🙃
So I recently found out (I apologise in advance that I know next to nothing about chess) there is a specific move that only involves the Rook piece, and the King. I think we can all agree Solas is the King in the greater beat of the DA story. Anyway it’s called Castling:
It consists of moving the king two squares toward a rook on the same rank and then moving the rook to the square that the king passed over. Castling is permitted only if neither the king nor the rook has previously moved; the squares between the king and the rook are vacant; and the king does not leave, cross over, or finish on a square attacked by an enemy piece. Castling is the only move in chess in which two pieces are moved at once.
Again, maybe I’m reaching but we could read the vacant spaces as the Fade, and a little bit more into the King not finishing in enemy territory. It’s also the only move where two pieces are moved at once - we know that Solas winds up trapped in the fade due to what happens in the first section of the game.
However there’s a little bit more:
Castling has its roots in the king's leap. There were two forms of the leap: the king would move once like a knight, or the king would move two squares on its first move. The knight move might be used early in the game to get the king to safety or later in the game to escape a threat. This second form was played in Europe as early as the 13th century. In North Africa, the king was transferred to a safe square by a two-move procedure: the king moved to the player's second rank, and the rook and king moved to each other's original squares.
This sounds familiar to what we saw in the gameplay reveal, right? Oh and:
Various forms of castling were developed due to the spread of rulesets during the 15th and 16th centuries which increased the power of the queen and bishop, allowing these pieces to attack from a distance and from both sides of the board, thus increasing the importance of king safety.
We could, oh…say that the Queen and the Bishop are Ghilan'nain and Elgar'nan.
And if we want to get super literal:
Castling is generally an important goal in the opening: it moves the king to safety away from the center files of the board, and it moves the rook to a more active position.
Anyway, could be nothing. 🙃
